I've been experiencing strange library file corruptions lately. A while back my gnome panel applets failed to load, the cause being a corrupted libpanel-applet-2.so.0. When I check its properties it fails to determine the size and permission hence I get a Permission Denied error when trying to reinstall the gnome-panel or even manually delete the file.

As far as I can remember there were no bad shut downs involved, so I have no idea why this has happened (my file system is reiserfs and I also have 2 full-to-the-brim ntfs partitions, can this be a cause?)

Now, how can I delete this file so I can reinstall gnome-panel? (I even tried single-user mode, no luck).

Thanks.

EDIT:

Issue resolved. A rebuild-tree with fsck did the trick.